What Does Your Authentic Self Look Like? Let Me Tell You About Mine…featured

“What Does Your Authentic Self Look Like?”

The prompt showed up in the middle of a yoga workshop. I paused for a second. “What kind of question is that?” was my first reaction.

Umm, she looks like me right now, sitting right here on a Sunday night with nothing else to do. After I put little Miss Ego aside, I began putting my pen to paper.

My authentic self is wearing Doc Martens boots with a platform and a flowy tutu-like dress with sparkles. She wears spikes on her chokers, and she has messy but organized waves in her hair – ‘Air-dried to Non-Perfection,’ she would like to call the “do.” It’s the one very inconsistent thing about the way she presents herself. Her makeup is perfect, but her legs have never been. Her smile is crooked, but her black eyeshadow around her eyes is perfectly straight and smoky. Some may call it too smoky for summertime, but she refuses to change it.

This is what she’s always looked like.

Yet… she’s older, wiser, and completely transformed/transforming on the inside. She recently blew up her entire life and boy, was it painful.

She sits here on her yoga mat excited to teach her next class and missing a past version of herself who felt super secure in the linear life she led. No, she will not be bringing that part of herself with her on her next adventure.

Her hair is more telling of the direction she wants to go in life. She no longer subscribes to a linear path or career. She no longer believes that the American Dream will fuel her forward progress.

All that said… she looks and feels like the most authentic version of herself to date.

She has unlearned and relearned so much in the years leading up to this moment.

It’s as though the last 5 months fast-tracked her to the greatest realization of her life – It won’t be worth it if you don’t try to impact people at scale. You are not meant to hide behind words or a desk or a single entity. 

If I had to write a poem to this version of me, it would go something like this:

Perfectly presented…you were forever protected from the muddy road.

You fought and fought against the tide, only to find your old self had died.

Bows & dresses, when all you yearned for was big, fat messes.

And so you walked the path alone – in the dark, surrounded by love, yet grasping for it.

What is love if you can’t see it in the dark?

What is love if you’ve never been able to feel the authentic spark?

You gripped onto only the things that you could hold because they were the only things you could see — oh, you poor little perfect sparkly baby.

Perfectly presented. Painfully resented….

On the deadly road to trusting in everyone but yourself. Imagine little you, perfect in her imperfection. Imagine little you, perfect in the aftermath of all that rejection.

You made it. You are bright. You are love. You feel the spark in your heart and the joy of a new start.

You are the greatest cheerleader of them all – the cheerleader rooting on for all of humanity. The cheerleader who made it out of all that insanity.

The greatest cheerleader who ever lived… Imagine a cheerleader tattered from all the wreckage — You are her. She is you. Look at you. You made it.

 

What does your authentic self look/feel like? What would you say to that version of yourself today?

Love Deeply and Forever,